Comic Artist Alison Bechdel: The Personal Is Political

The final installment of Anne Elizabeth Moore's exclusive interview with Alison Bechdel appears on Ladydrawers today, illustrated by Gabrielle Gamboa. The bestselling and critically acclaimed author of "Fun Home" and "Dykes to Watch Out For" acknowledges the larger challenges impacting all cartoonists today, like being a self-taught artist dealing with a rampantly professionalizing industry, or working with pen and ink in the digital age.

"Comics are a sort of mental illness," she says—and she may have a point.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow, Weinberg Fellow at the Newberry Library, a Fulbright scholar, and the author of several award-winning non-fiction books including Unmarketable (The New Press, 2007) and Cambodian Grrrl (2011). Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet and the founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She contributes criticism to The New Inquiry, The Baffler, N+1p and many others and writes a monthly comic strip for Truthout called Ladydrawers on gender, labor, and culture. Her latest book from Cantankerous Titles, New Girl Law, was called “A post-empirical, proto-fourth-wave feminist memoir” by Bust Magazine.

Comic Artist Alison Bechdel: The Personal Is Political

The final installment of Anne Elizabeth Moore's exclusive interview with Alison Bechdel appears on Ladydrawers today, illustrated by Gabrielle Gamboa. The bestselling and critically acclaimed author of "Fun Home" and "Dykes to Watch Out For" acknowledges the larger challenges impacting all cartoonists today, like being a self-taught artist dealing with a rampantly professionalizing industry, or working with pen and ink in the digital age.

"Comics are a sort of mental illness," she says—and she may have a point.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow, Weinberg Fellow at the Newberry Library, a Fulbright scholar, and the author of several award-winning non-fiction books including Unmarketable (The New Press, 2007) and Cambodian Grrrl (2011). Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet and the founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She contributes criticism to The New Inquiry, The Baffler, N+1p and many others and writes a monthly comic strip for Truthout called Ladydrawers on gender, labor, and culture. Her latest book from Cantankerous Titles, New Girl Law, was called “A post-empirical, proto-fourth-wave feminist memoir” by Bust Magazine.